101 Reasons to Stop Writing

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Because I love you all, I’m going to pass on some handy stock advice. If you own stock in Borders Books and Music, pay attention to your analyst and dump it as fast as you can, as soon as you can. Alternately, if you don’t, get prepared to buy up lots of Borders stock and short the shit out of it right after Christmas. Borders has already been flirting with bankruptcy and moved to heavy petting last holiday season, complete with a talk of a merger with Barnes & Noble, and the fact that its current latest publicity stunt involves its new employee vanity press gives an idea of how badly the company must be doing.

Working both as a features writer for various magazines and weekly newspapers and as a technical writer for various telecom-related companies, I have by necessity learned how to sniff out a media venue’s imminent demise. It’s a fascinating dance, where the owners want to sell but can’t sell unless they can prove that the enterprise has something approximating a worthwhile value, and that value is usually tied up in its workforce. Quite understandably, discovering that their place of employ is about ready to be sold for parts, or bought to be shut down, encourages all but the most deluded grunts and middle managers to consider that latest job offer or nibble, and the company’s value goes under for the last time as the only people who know how to run its operations bail out for safer employ. Because the upper managers stand to make insane amounts of money, both from the sale and from “executive retention bonuses” designed to reward incompetent managers for sticking with a dying company until the sale is final, the last thing they want is for the workforce to leave before they’ve decided that it’s no longer necessary.

To that end, I’ve seen some of the sleaziest, most backhanded, and most ridiculous stunts intended to keep employees on the bridge of the Titanic, and the most entertaining always come from dying magazines and newspapers. Being sad creatures, most magazine and newspaper staffers put up with poor pay, lousy work conditions, and incessant sexual harrassment on the hope that they’ll be in the right spot to become Noticed, and they’ll believe any outrageous lie if it means that they might get a regular column, become an editor, or get corporate sponsorship of the book deal they’ve been obsessing over. (I’m just as guilty as anyone else of this, but I’d like to think that I learned from my mistakes. This is why I don’t include the two weeks where I was technically senior editor of the long-dead weekly DFW Icon on my resume.)

It’s not news that booksellers with delusions of being publishers have been popping up and going bankrupt ever since the first organ-grinder monkey got the idea of conducting a concerto. Just look up the history of “Wired Books” one of these days. It’s also not news that one of the two battle cries of every bookstore grunt who continues to slave away on a dead-end retail position, when asked “Why do you keep working when you could use your college degree to get something better?”, is “But I wanna stay in the publishing business!” (The other battle cry is “I’m not getting paid enough to work this hard,” usually said right before being rejected for a raise because the slacker couldn’t be bothered to work hard enough to earn one. The notorious spoof Borders Online Employment Application was written after considerable observation of the Borders employee in its native habitat.) The level of hubris in that cry, in a world where we’d all justifiably laugh and point at a McDonald’s frycook crying “But I wanna stay in the ranching business!”, says a lot about the unjustified romance attached to working in a bookstore, and it’s right up there with the perceived romance of starving in an unheated loft apartment while “pursuing your art”.

Kids, take it from my experience. Starving and freezing in a garrett space might sound romantic when you’re 21 and don’t know any better, but living in squalor loses all of its charm by the time your thirtieth birthday rolls around. The chain bookstores couldn’t keep a workforce were it not for the hearty denial of legions of well-read twits with all of the hopes of a fiftysomething Whitesnake groupie, and Borders management knows it.

Now, author Nick Mamatas had quite a bit of fun with the whole idea of Borders starting a line of books written by its employees, and other wags correctly asked such pertinent questions as “So what happens to the guy who has to remainder his own books?” It’s not as if Borders has any track record for anything other than opening superstores next to incompetently run indie bookstores and stealing away the employees. (At the store down the street from my house, at least two of the managers are people who drove their stores out of business all on their own, and continue to work at Borders because nobody’s insane enough to trust them with the money to start a new store.) Borders let both Amazon and Barnes & Noble take over the online sales market before anyone even deigned to start up an official Borders Web site that actually allowed customers to buy books. While Barnes & Noble built up quite the customer incentive program with its preferred customer cards, Borders only recently started their own “free” program, which offers no real discount for joining but gives Borders plenty of information for data mining. The only real draw Borders ever had was that it offered deep discounts on new hardcovers to its customers, and now it’s being squeezed by Wal-Mart and Amazon, two companies that know how to cut their margins. And somehow a new book line full of employees’ contributions is supposed to make a difference.

The real reason why I’m recommending shorting the stock in December, though, is because of the way the employee book line is being run. If you go up and read the actual press release on it, this is a contest. Because of the joys of being a writer, Borders has a lot of fulltime and parttime writers in its employ, many of which would probably be glad to contribute everything from historical novels to science fiction encyclopedias if Borders was interested in a real book line. Instead, the idea is that those pros are to have their work put in a big slushpile alongside every Legolas/Gimli slashfic writer manning the Graphic Novels section, have them picked through by persons unknown, and voted upon by judges unknown, with no way of being able to tell if the winners got their breaks due to talent or because a Borders district manager wants to break in his casting couch. And before you say it, yes, that’s ridiculous from a publishing point of view. You’ll notice that the only people in book publishing who run such “contests” are vanity presses, and that’s because everyone wins in one of those.

While we’re at it, let’s look at the people who’d be participating. Anyone who’s ever been to a Borders book signing knows the murderous look from about half of the employees at the author, and anyone who’s ever roomed with, dated, or been married to a Borders employee has heard all of the crass and whiny comments of “I can’t believe that s/he actually got a contract! I know I can write better than s/he can!” At least with a book line that works with established authors, that line can point to “The bestselling author of Brand X” to promote each offering. What’s Borders going to do? Run an ad campaign that starts with “You know Smitty, the unwashed toad who gets into pissing matches with customers in the Computer Science section over Java programming and who hides in the back whenever he’s asked a question by a customer? Buy his latest book, Hot Science Fiction Editors I’d Like To Pork, exclusively at Borders today!”?

All said, this whole scheme is ridiculous, asinine, and incredibly expensive for the miniscule return … if it were actually dedicated to publishing undiscovered authors within the Borders family. However, remember that the only people are allowed to play are Borders employees, and I’ll bet good money that any participant has to sign a release form stating that any book deal is contingent upon remaining an employee in good standing. Faced with the promise of becoming a real author person, complete with signing junkets and writeups in Publisher’s Weekly, how many participants are going to leave even as the stern of the Titanic slips beneath the surface and upper management collects its executive retention bonuses? After all, when it comes down to value for money, nobody’s going to expect them to stay for free while they’re taking care of the bankruptcy proceedings. And in the darkness and the cold, the mewling of “But they promised they’d publish my book!” will be the last anyone will hear.

– Paul Riddell has been accused of being a Borders employee, but attending a local poetry reading in 1994 left him wanting to shoot at school buses for years afterward. More examples of hubris and bile are available at the Esoteric Science Resource Center.